Perfectly imperfect: An oral history of the 1993 Auburn football season (Part 1)

Editor’s Note: This is Part 1 in a three-part oral history series looking back to Auburn’s 1993 season. Part 2 and Part 3 will be published in each of the next two weeks.

There are a lot of ways to define Auburn’s 1993 season. A campaign, now 25 years into history, remembered famously for its perfectly imperfect 11-0 record.

It could be defined by overcoming a coaching change, deep and scathing sanctions. The beloved 12-year head coach Pat Dye resigned following the 1992 season amid a program scandal involving a former player getting paid. The 36-year old head coach at Samford, Terry Bowden, was hired to replace him. The sanctions didn’t allow for a bowl game. The team couldn’t even play on television.

It could be defined by a slew of improbable wins. A goal-line stand to beat Vanderbilt on the road. A comeback shootout-win against a high-powered No. 4 Florida team. A bone-chilling cold at Arkansas. And victories over two heated rivals — Georgia and Alabama — to cap off the year.

But this story will define that season through the eyes of those that lived it. This story will be defined by the untold perspectives and memories from one of Auburn’s most legendary seasons.

PART 1: THE SANCTIONS

Auburn’s sanctions came down on Aug. 19, just weeks before the season was set to start. There was a two-year postseason ban, a two-year probation, a reduction in scholarships and a one-year television ban.

Dye resigned following the 1992 season amid the scandal, with the NCAA report saying he failed to exert “appropriate institutional control.” The sanctions were a result of an investigation into the payment of a former player, Eric Ramsey, who had recordings of the interactions.

And Auburn, which at that point had a lengthy history of sanctions against its athletic department, was given its ruling.

Joe Frazier — Jr. Fullback: “One of the most vivid memories I have going into the 1993 season was the meeting when they came in during the preseason and told us there was no TV, there was no this, and all of the sanctions came down at one time. There was no more ambiguity about it. This was definite.”

“...It was really brief, it was really brief.”

Chris Shelling — Jr. Safety: “It was a little tense. We all got together as a group, the players, and we tried to weigh our options. Did we wanna stay together? Did we want to stay there? Or did we wanna try to go somewhere else. And we all decided that we were gonna stay there.”

Gary Walker — Jr. Defensive Tackle: “I remember when all that went on, we had Wayne Gandy getting up and speaking to everybody. And we just kind of stayed together on it, you know.”“He just got up and said the only way we’re gonna be seen, is we’re gonna have to win. And everybody bought in, and that’s what happened you know.”

James Bostic — Jr. Running Back: “We all stuck it out and want to continue the run and see where we could take it. We were a close knit team.”

Willie Gosha — Fr. Running Back: “We all had a meeting, and I believe with the rules that we could have transferred and went anywhere and been eligible to play. And we all decided to stay there, and play with Auburn. And I’m glad we did that.”

Shelling: “We all met in the auditorium. Me, James Bostic, Frank Sanders, Brian Robinson, Calvin Jackson, you know, those group of guys, Dell McGee. You know, we sat down and we said we were gonna stick it out. We were gonna make this thing happen.”

It’s important to understand the perspective of the players who’d been there, and who’d been recruited by Dye, who was also the Auburn AD for 11 seasons. They may have only won 10 combined games in the two years before his departure, but there was still a lot of loyalty on the 1993 team to the coach that recruited them.

William Muse — Auburn University President: “About the only time you would find an athletic director who was also the head football coach might be at a Division-III school or maybe a Division-II. … The role of the athletic director is to oversee the performance of the coaches, both on the field and off the field, in terms of the way in which they are doing their job. And certainly in terms of the payment of players or the violation of NCAA rules. … And the pressure was very clear to me that if we were going to resolve this issue, we were going to have to do deal with that dilemma.”

Pat Dye — Former Head Coach: “I didn’t have to resign. I just thought it was the best thing for Auburn. And now, the rest is history.”

Muse: “It was hard to deny that Pat was not aware of the fact that athletes were being paid. There was a need to make a change there.”

“I think he had to be urged or suggested that was the action that had to be taken.”

Bostic: “The chip that we had on our shoulders for the way Pat Dye had to leave out. And with a lot of guys realizing that Pat Dye had brought that team together, built that team, a lot of guys felt loyal to him.”

Fred Smith — Jr. Cornerback: “Everyone that was playing out there, we was playing for Coach Dye because he recruited us. I felt like it wasn’t Terry’s team.”

Mile Pelton — Jr. Defensive Tackle: “Most of the guys in that room he had orchestrated some way of getting to that point. He had brought us all there. He had recruited us and Coach Dye has always been like a father figure to the guys."

Calvin Jackson — So. Cornerback: “I don’t know if the rest of the guys felt that way, but to me and some of the other guys, we really felt that that was Pat Dye’s team.”

Terry Bowden — Head Coach: “When you’re Bobby Bowden’s son, and of course I’m the first coach in Division I history to win 100 games. We go undefeated. I’ve got 172 wins, I’ve been a head coach 25 years, and I’ve had a lot of success as a coach. And I’m lucky to be a distant second or third best in my own family. So if anybody was prepared to be the guy that followed Pat Dye, I followed Bobby Bowden.”

Dye: “I loved those guys, and I’d been through the battles with them, and I knew they were gonna be good. … I went to the games. I didn’t go on the road with them, but I went to all the games in town.”

For some, remembering the start of the season had less to do with the punishment against the school, and more to do with their own personal lives — and if football could still be a part of them.

Smith: “Two days prior, I got hurt. The day of the sanctions, I was in Birmingham laid up in a hospital after just having knee surgery. And really when I came to ... and turned the TV on, that’s when they were giving out sanctions. … The way my knee was they told me that I wouldn’t ever play again.”

Scott Etheridge — Sr. Kicker: “I actually used to write Fred Smith’s number on my tape, on my sock. I just had a six. It became superstitious. I wanted him to know, you’re with us.”

Jackson: “We lost Fred Smith right before that first game and that kind of like, really dampened our thoughts as far as the season was concerned.”

Smith: One time during the game is Coach Bowden, he would look at me on the sideline because I was telling the guys, ‘Watch out for this. This is coming,’ and everything. And he kind of saw that and welcomed me in, not just as a player, but I felt like as a coach also. Because I felt like I was helping those guys out. Even though I wasn’t on the field playing, I was as much a part of every win they had because of my preparation with them.”

Sean Carder — Sr. Wide Receiver: “My senior year, 1993, I was actually accepted into vet school at that time. And one of the prerequisites was you’re not allowed to do any extra activities. They had initially asked me to stop playing. You have to focus on school. And I knew I wasn’t playing NFL football, so I had several meetings with the academic people at the vet school and Coach Bowden, and my family and everybody just trying to figure out what I was going to do. Thankfully, the vet school in the end let me play.

“My coaches had to let me be late a lot of times to practice because school was going until three or four in the afternoon. And I couldn’t miss school. … I had to miss a couple of those flights and catch up later, be late to practices and meetings. It was a lot of work to try and make this thing work. Again, we were winning. We started out winning. And when you win, it’s much easier to let a player be late and ease up on things.”

The new coaching staff came in and had a different attitude about things.The team was put through grueling workouts. Though there were some defensive coaches that returned, it was mostly a new, and very young staff.

Brian Robinson — So. Safety: “Brutal. It was brutal. It was brutal. Brutal to the point where it bonded everyone that went through it.

“Well the just the runs, the conditioning, running 26 200s, in 25 seconds or 26 seconds. Just the squats, the weight rooms, the two 25s, 3 sets of 20. That’s brutal. That’s brutal. And you had to go all the way down. Our strength and conditioning coach Steve Maple had his workers, his GAs, standing there and if it didn’t count, you had to do it until it was done in a proper way.”

Pelton: “It was bad, man. I don’t wanna say it was bad. It was just tough, it was tough, man. I remember guys just really questioning, did they wanna play football, did they want to continue. … Going through that time, I was like, ‘Man, am I gonna come back for my senior year if it’s gonna be like this?’”

Ramon Luster — So. Defensive Tackle: “We ran these things called fifths. [Bowden] always said, ‘go get your fifths, that way when you’re tired in the fourth quarter, you’re able to push through, you’re able to fight through.’ We called them fifths, it was a lap around the field.”

Derrick Dorn — So. Tight End: “Coach (Rick Trickett), our offensive line coach, he loved the F-bomb. He dropped the F-bomb like 250-something times in practice one day. Our trainers, they were recording it. They were writing it down every time.”

Bowden: “I can remember just talking to the players and saying, ‘Well just believe in each other and work together, become a team, we’ll have a chance.’ In my mind, all I could think was, ‘Man, this thing has gotta be rebuilt. Hopefully, maybe I can just win one more game than the guy that was here before.’”

Robinson: “Terry now, being a great friend of mine. I think he was overwhelmed. It’s like a deer in headlights.”

Muse: “The expectation for his first season was not very high because he had basically the same players that Pat had had the previous season.”

Luster: “What’s the movie where the lawyer comes down, and there’s some kids they vacation in Alabama and they got in trouble? Joe Pesci plays his lawyer. I think I forgot the name of that movie. I wanna say, ‘My cousin Vinny’, but that may not be it. Just the things that he would say, he was just a firm believer, you work hard, you’ve got to believe. He was a fired up, rah rah guy.”

Etheridge: “No one picked us to do anything. We lost some teammates. And then obviously it was very disappointing to have the sanctions, especially because you didn’t do anything wrong. It was someone else who did the wrong things. So you had all these people penalized by something someone else did."

Willie Whitehead — Jr. Defensive End: “Guys were in disbelief. Just mad, pissed off that that happened. … It even worse from a guy that played previously in the past, what he decided to do, we had to suffer because of it.”

Etheridge: “We just kind of said screw it, and forget everybody else, we’re going to solely focus on us and ignore everybody else. Let’s just go win football games.”

Bowden: “it was a very difficult time for Auburn. There was so much going on at that time.”

Frazier: “In retrospect, the TV ban that they imposed on us, probably the second-worst sanction that the NCAA has ever given a team than the SMU death penalty.”

Jimbo Fisher — Quarterbacks Coach: “Actually the probation might have cleared things up. We can’t go, but we can go play well, that’s all we can control, and they did it. It was a very mature team that year, a lot of great leaders on that team.”

Wayne Gandy — Sr. Offensive Tackle: “I remember going to ... SEC day was in Birmingham that year. … I told the people up there, I said, ‘We’re gonna go undefeated.’ And everybody laughs in the media room. And I’m like, ‘No, we are gonna go undefeated, y’all will see.’ And I just knew that we had bonded.”

Stan White — Sr. Quarterback: “I remember telling my roommate at the time, and a couple of guys … I said, ‘Hey guys, let’s just go out there and win them all and show them how we’re the best on the field. And sure enough, did I say it in a manner — yeah I meant it. I said it pretty much like that, a flippant manner.”

Bowden: “I would be kidding you if anyone said beforehand, secretly to ourselves, ‘We’re gonna win them all.’”